He hurried between the box borders along the path, and all the sweet scents of the garden came to him, and the homely, well-known odours of the farm. There was lavender somewhere, wallflower, mignonette; sweet briar, faint salt from the far sea, and the scent of the ready grass asking for the scythe. Now he was close to the whitewashed porch, with its stone seats and its arch of rose, and the little beds at its feet that were full of snowdrops in the spring. Then he was inside the porch, in the stream of gold that went swimming through the door, and felt himself shabby and poor in the purity of the light. He was like a threadbare tramp, he thought to himself, being carried up to Heaven in a chariot of fire.... The kitchen seemed dim and narrow to him after the open marsh, or else his eyes were weakened by weariness and sun. Nothing came out or spoke to him as he stood, waiting for the first tremendous swelling of joy. In the old days the peace of the house had been so free that it had never hidden itself until he was inside. It had come out to meet him before he reached the porch, like a child that runs to a father coming home. To-night the kitchen was empty and very quiet, but it was an aloof stillness, self-absorbed ... detached. The voice of the grandfather’s clock in the silence spoke as if speaking only to itself. He, too, now that he was under the roof, felt curiously detached. Only half of him, he felt, was in the house; the other—the dreaming half—was left outside. But still he hoped and stood, waiting for the uprising of his heart, and Thomas, respectfully sympathetic, waited too. Perhaps it was because of Thomas that the magic would not work. Suddenly he began to feel self-conscious under his son’s eyes, and the fear that was fear of a fear came drifting back. Shrinking, he took a hasty plunge through the kitchen door, and caught his foot on a flag as he went in. Thomas, following, found him just inside, puzzling and staring worriedly at the floor. “Summat catched my foot,” he was saying repeatedly with a pained surprise. He bent down to the flag as if wishing to test it with his hand as well as his feet. “I never mind catching my foot afore,” he said. It was just as if he couldn’t believe he had done the thing, as if his boots had been bound to know the flag—the same old boots—all patched—that he had been wearing when he left. But he and the boots had forgotten because they were old, and the flag had forgotten the memory of his tread. It did not do to fret about these things, because perhaps they always happened to folks who went away. Marget, at least, would have told him so, he knew. Nevertheless, the trivial little mischance weighed upon his mind. It was like some base betrayal on the part of ancient friends.